New Björk City

When I was in New York last week, I thought it was ashing in Soho from the wildfires still surging to the north. It wasn’t ash, though, it was aphids. Winged aphids! Normally only present after the hot season cooled to autumn, these wretched insects—stupefied by the East Coast’s warm winter—believed summer had already passed, and reproduced under the chainmail of fire smoke clotting out the sunlight. The effect was cosmic horror. Living clouds swarming across South Brooklyn, downtown Manhattan. The end of the world is confusing hordes of bugs for wildfire ash.

People I know (gay) joked about the smoke bugs on social media in that way that only New Yorkers can in the face of oblivion. I still have that reflex, I think. I felt I’d earned my Forever New Yorker status after living there during Hurricane Sandy. That strange week where one half of the city was in darkness, and the other half was off work and on drugs, oblivious to the horror along the coasts. In the months following, closed down subway lines every weekend—its ancient tracks destroyed by seawater. And the city’s solution: overcrowded shuttle busses. We all faced surefire proof that the earth really was starting to boil alive, and there would be more superstorms where Sandy came from.

But so much has happened since Sandy, and my place in New York disappeared as soon as I moved away from it. New York forgets you fast after you leave. It’s nothing personal. You’re either there or you’re not. New York City is a selfish, unpredictable parent—staggering and withholding. When it wraps its arms around you, even for a moment, you become an instant addict. You fiend for its love.

Whenever I do come back to the city, only a handful of times since I moved away nearly seven years ago, I still seek its approval. I long for it to take me back. I pretend I know where I’m going, meandering around somewhere like Tribeca, which after all this time, I still don’t believe is a real place. The same neighborhood where last week, after giving the incorrect hotel address to the cab driver, I crossed back and forth on Varick Street a minimum of eight times in a sweaty panic, stopping to ask people if they knew where the Marriott Courtyard was. Two samaritans said “It’s over there,” and the other said, “I don’t know. I’m from California.”

“I am, too!” I said back to him, weirdly loud.

He’d already walked past me, but I could hear him politely chuckle. I was grateful for him. My fellow Californian. Both of us directionless in this make believe section of a planet-sized city. I found the hotel eventually, a mere one hundred feet away from where I’d walked in circles for 20 minutes. I got back to my room, took a shower and felt rage for exactly ten minutes about not knowing New York that well anymore.

The next morning, I woke up early, emptied out the Trader Joe’s bag I traveled with, and slipped down into the subway stop below my hotel. I bought a physical Metro Card that I bragged about later, and was promptly told by multiple people that you can just use your phone to buy rides now. Curses! I took the uptown 1 Train to Union Square, then realized I didn’t know why I’d gotten off there, so I surfaced and went to Walgreen’s. I wandered through the aisles for a while, and then finally thought of something I could buy. I asked an employee to open up the anti-theft shelf so I could grab a razor. As she did it, I wanted so badly to confess to her what I had just done. That I had hopped on the subway for no reason other than to have just one rider look up at me and think ‘Wow! That’s a New Yorker if I ever saw one.’

After Walgreen’s, I walked to the West Village, and decided to find an AA meeting. I went to a place I used to go to in early sobriety that was filled with scary old straight men from Long Island and New Jersey who made me afraid to relapse because I was convinced one or more of them would yell at me if I did. On my way I saw tourists posing in front of Carrie Bradshaw’s roped-off brownstone, now with a large Ukraine flag, hung up in solidarity. It looked crazy to me. I tried one last time to picture myself still living in New York: on my lunch break from work and ducking into a meeting to bookend my weekend with a freebase of recovery. I saw it for a second—a pang of scalding bittersweet and wonder, and then it was gone.